Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Dipawali Bonanza fails to crack!!

Everybody went gaga about implementation of PRC as all of us were resigned to the possibility of prolonged delay. But it was not implementation as the link on the website suggested. It's just a proposal which has to go through the scrutiny of a group of officers. No body knows what would be the final outcome! It would have been better if it is declared after the approval from the ministry.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Being a house master in Navodaya means you are a teacher cum warden. Though they call you a loco parent, house master is not any where near to the parent. If we analyze the teachers role as House Master, the major advantage is the extent of influence a teacher can wield on children so that that the things go normal. There are a few disadvantages from academic perspective:
House Masters and children are always so near, things get so informal and it results in lack of seriousness regarding academics. They show in movies such as To Sir with Love and TJP,but it never happens in reality. You can't find many teachers with all the virtues. It's human to have vices. So such vices are also going to sprout in your students. It's OK to bear the bedlam created by a couple of children in your house. But what about the bedlam by a gang of 40. So here starts the gap!! You want them to be silent. They want to live like children. You want them to grow a few years more, they want to get a few years younger.

Monday, October 13, 2008

How much pension you would get?

Government of India decided to adopt New Pension Plan for NVS employees. Presently under CPF system, 10 per cent of basic pay is subscribed by the employee and the same amount is added by NVS. Under the new system, one has to pay 10 percent of basic and dearness allowance and the same amount will be added by NVS. The other big difference is transparency and empowerment that comes to you to manage your own money. Presently the return is pegged with the rate of interest decided for EPFO. Which is paltry considering the rate of return that could be generated with proper allocation to equity. Many employees out rightly reject the idea of new pension plan. Before taking a decision, proper study is required. If you take an example of 30 year old employee, whose basic salary stands at 20000 with expected average annual increase of 3 percent, will fetch him less than a crore as his retirement fund. (Taking average rate of 8 percent) Under new system the retirement corpus would be less than 5 crore. As the Dearness Allowance is also included for the subscription the expected average annual increase in the salary amount can be presumed at 8 percent. Over the long term equity would usually fetch 15 percent (there is great deal of historical evidence to prove that point). If you want to calculate your own retirement corpus, you can do it here.
Out of the retirement corpus, 6o percent of it can be taken back by you. Remaining 40 percent you have to hand over to an insurance company for your pension. You can customize it as per your requirement. All that will be done based on the interest rate at the time of your retirement. So what worries many of us may be lack of fixed amount. Who knows we get more than what we would get under the old policy? All of us need to do lot of home work! The first step is to get acquinted with the new system. You can do it at pension portal of govt of india.

How isolated they are!

Just I wanted to know how many of them knew it. To my utter surprise, none. Across the world the tremors are felt of US Economic downturn. But our children are not aware of it. This may not be the case with all the Vidyalayas. But everywhere it's felt that our children need to be more update with the world. This is one of the gray areas.
I remember clearly how terrific I felt when I came to know that I would get my newspaper only on the third day of publication. I joined NVS in northeast. It was the case with my first Vidyalaya. But today I would not feel so. Though I'm not physically connected, I am lucky to be connected with the world through web. As a matter of fact, I prefer the later. It may appear strange to an outsider to hear that many teachers have lot of reservations about allowing children to have free access to internet. But I feel when children have real and open access to the internet, then there would be revolutionary change in the way they learn. With the 3G and Wimax, things are going to get better. How much it would cost to equip all the students with a laptop in a Navodaya? It would be roughly around ten million rupees. It's a cost NVS can't afford. So another revolution is needed to make wonders with the way our children learn and that is an ultra cheap laptop!
Last year I celebrated Diwali at Hyderabad along with my parents. I don't dare to go there for this season as I am apprehensive about my five month old baby's health. Last Diwali was a nightmare for me with all that noise and poisonous air. On the next day, I could find large number of visitors at the local hospital. News papers prominently mentioned the high pollution level recorded in the city during the three days of festival. So I am lucky, I got a serene and green environment to live with !

Navodaya Employees got pension!!!!

This was the news, which was covered on almost all the news papers, a day after the cabinet meeting decided to introduce New Pension Plan to Navodaya employees. Staff of Navodayas, spread across the country, were jubilant. But as the real facts emerged gradually, the jubilation gave way for despondence! What cabinet has done is just equalling the services of the staff who have put years of hardwork with that of new employees who have joined after 2004. Policy makers and politicians do know that the teachers of these greatly accliamed schools have no big numbers to shake their vote banks. So make them guinny pigs and experiment as you wish!

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Hope against hopes!

Everybody who is even remotely related with the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya's will certainly understand how hard it is for a Navodaya Teacher to maintain a blog and keep posting. Still I decided to do it. I hope I'd be able to find time out of my daily drudgery.